Fig. 6 Plant performance assessments of cucumber root. A, photograph of cucumber root growth treated with four different
treatments after 25 d. Effect of inoculation with T. asperellum Q1 strain on the root length (B), root weight (C) and root activity (D).out by means of phosphatase enzymes. In fact, the major
source of phosphatase activity in soil is considered to be of microbial origin (Rodriguez and Fraga 1999); and these phosphatases could catalyze the hydrolysis of P from
organic forms (Wang and Pant 2010). While phytase is a special type of phosphatase that is able to hydrolyze phosphate from phytic acid as well as from other phosphorylated
substrates (Gibson and Ullah 1990), it could be presumedthat various phytases and phosphatases secreted by soil microorganisms were important for plants to enhance Pavailability, which might increase plant salt stress tolerance.Some Trichoderma spp. are well known to be active phytase
and acid phosphatase producers (Nasi et al. 1999; Kapri and Tewari 2010), but there are few reports on the activity of phytase which may determine the P mobilization in soil and increase P acquisition by plant. In our study, phytate was found to support better fungal strain Q1 growth, with little organic acids production in phytate medium and the activity of acid phosphatase was much higher than that of
alkaline phosphatase, which is distinguishable from the report by Kapri and Tewari (2010).